David The Hebrew -- By: David O’brien

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 23:3 (Sep 1980)
Article: David The Hebrew
Author: David O’brien


David The Hebrew

David O’brien*

Since George Mendenhall published his seminal work, “The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,” 1 there has been a growing trend in OT scholarship toward the interpretation of the conquest and settlement as a sociological development within an existing settled population. In very brief outline, Mendenhall’s political thesis saw a small religious community becoming the nucleus for a sweeping revolutionary movement that in the space of two or three generations restructured Canaanite society. The Yahweh covenant constituted an overt rejection of the political, social and religious values in effect at the time of the establishment of the community and provided the basis for a unity among a disparate, nonrelat-ed people. Our purpose in this paper is not to deal specifically with the early revolutionary phase of this movement but rather with what Mendenhall characterizes as the failure of the social experiment in the successful counter-revolutionary return to the old values under the Davidic monarchy.2

While we must reject the presuppositions that underlie his work and, with the presuppositions, many of his conclusions, we must also acknowledge gratitude for the scholarly spadework that has gone into Mendenhall’s work. What he has done is to call our attention to a level of complexity in the history of Israelite origins that is all too often overlooked in evangelical treatments of the subject. While his basic approach is to reinterpret the Biblical record radically on the basis of extra-Biblical history, ours will be an attempted synthesis with the goal of better understanding the Biblical text.

There is a fine distinction to be made here. While Mendenhall asserts that he takes the Biblical traditions “seriously if not literally,” 3 we will take those traditions both seriously and literally, while recognizing that the objectives of the Biblical writers often led them to omit information that twentieth-century scholars dearly wish they had included.

Our intention will be to extend the vexed problem of ʾapirū the to include the establishment of the monarchy, arguing that the picture of David in I and 2 Samuel is consistent with what M. B. Rowton has called the “parasocial element” in tribal society. 4 We will further argue that Saul fits Rowton’s description of the

*David O’Brien is instructor in Bible and theology at St. Paul Bible College in St. Bonifacius, Minnesota.

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